13 things NOT to do when selling products and services online. Don't do these things. Ever.
Here's a compilation of 13 silly and even stupid ways some companies are hindering online adoption of their products and services. If your company is doing any of these things, don't.
- Forcing Immediate Registration: Requiring a new user to register is a reasonable request—after you've sucked him in. The sites that require registration as the first step are putting a barrier in front of adoption.
- The Long URL: Say a site generates a URL that's 70 characters long or more. When you copy, paste, and e-mail this URL, a line break is added. Then, people can't click on the link or it only links to the first part of the URL.
- Windows That Don't Generate URLs: Have you ever wanted to point people to a page, but the page has no URL? Did the company decide it didn't want referrals, links, and additional traffic?
- The Unsearchable Web site: Some sites don't offer a search option. If your site goes deeper than one level, it needs a search box.
- Sites Without Delicious, Digg and Fark bookmarks: There's no reason why a company wouldn't want its fans to bookmark its pages. When my blog hits the front page of Digg, page views typically increase six or seven times.
- Limiting Contact Info To E-Mail: Don't get me wrong; I live and die by e-mail. But sometimes I want to call or even snail-mail a company. Many companies only let you send an e-mail via their "Contact Us" page. Why can't companies be honest and just call it "Don't Contact Us"?
- Lack Of Feeds And E-Mail Lists: Make getting information about your products and services easy by providing e-mail and RSS feeds for content and PR newsletters.
- Making Users Retype E-Mail Addresses: How about the patent-pending, curve-jumping Web 2.0 company that wants you to share content but requires you to retype your friends' e-mail addresses? I have 7,703 e-mail addresses in Microsoft Entourage. I'm not going to retype them into some done-as-an-afterthought address book.
- Not Allowing E-mail Addresses As User Names: I'm a member of hundreds of sites. I can't remember my user names, but I can remember my e-mail address. So why not let me use that?
- Case-Sensitive Usernames And Passwords: I know; these are more secure. But then I'm more likely to type in my user name and password incorrectly.
- Friction-Full Commenting: "Moderated comments" is an oxymoron. If your company is trying to be a hip, myth-busting, hypocrisy-outing joint, it should let anyone comment. Also, many times I've started to leave a comment on a blog but stopped when I realized I'd have to register.
- Unreadable Confirmation Codes: A visual confirmation graphic system is a good thing, but many are too difficult to read. All you have to prove is that you're not a robot. So if the code is "ghj1lK," entering "ghj11K" should be good enough.
- E-mails Without Signatures: Communication would be so much easier if everyone included a complete e-mail signature with their name, company, address, phone, and e-mail address.
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Guy Kawasaki's mantra is "Empower people." He is co-founder of Alltop.com, a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, former chief evangelist for Apple Inc. and author of nine books--most recently, Reality Check.
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